Obama and the Future of Foreign Relations

This Wednesday, November 14th, Barack Obama was greeted by over 5,000 people from around the Bay Area in San Francisco. Some 20 Lick students attended, as part of an even scheduled by the Social Justice Club. Though I could not make it, the Sacramento Bee wrote that Obama issued a “passionate call to end the war in Iraq, stop U.S. practice of torture and advance racial equality and gay rights in America,” which was received with “thunderous cheers.” For the full article, please click here.

I was also told by a student who attended on Wednesday that Obama also spoke fervently about stopping the genocide in Darfur. Immediately, I went to his website, BarackObama.com, to learn more about his plans and stance on this issue, as well as the rest of his plans for presidency. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the number one issue on his list is “Strengthening America Overseas,” and rebuilding America as a transparent and tolerant diplomatic government in foreign affairs. Along with ending the conflict in Congo and stopping nuclear terrorism, “stopping the genocide in Darfur” is also high on this list.
Quoting from BarackObama.com, “Senator Obama has been a leading voice in Washington urging the end of genocide in Sudan. He worked with Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) on the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, a version of which was signed into law. Senator Obama has traveled to the United Nations to meet with Sudanese officials and visited refugee camps on the Chad-Sudan border to raise international awareness of the ongoing humanitarian disaster there. He also worked with Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) to secure $20 million for the African Union peacekeeping mission.
‘Two senators from opposite sides of the aisle have joined together to call for increased U.S. involvement in Darfur. They are Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, and Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois.’-Gwen Ifill, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, PBS, February 16, 2006”

This is especially good news for those who continue to be in peril in Darfur as well as for the awareness of fellow Americans. However, as we know, the situation is extremely complex and protected, therefore it would be an ambitious task for any President to tackle.

One point that many other those opposed to Obama claim that though he presents ample “solutions” for some important issues such as Iraq, healthcare, and the environment, with no substantial amount of experience, it leaves room for doubt and mistakes, especially in a period in American history where mistakes and bad decisions are the last thing that our country needs. Some also say that Obama, in his campaign and speeches across the country, has spent too much time criticizing Bush and other candidates, and not quite enough explaining in more detail how he will accomplish all that he promises as president.

Therefore, I invite you to visit these sites, and read over some of the other platforms that other candidates are using in their campaigns for the 2008 elections. Afterwards, use this space as a forum, discussion or debate on your stance on the election, and in particular, what this election could mean for Darfur and other foreign issues that we have been discussing in this class.

And for those of you who did have the opportunity to see Obama this Wednesday, please share your experience as well.

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and Doing "What is Natural"

Hello everyone,
Last class we watched a video on the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town in the south of France where approximately 5,000 Jews were hidden from the Nazis. The people of Le Chambon continued helping these people and displayed open resistance to the Nazis and Vichy France (France's govenrment when cooperating with the Nazis) even when Nazi soldiers were present. In this article and in the video, the inhabitants of Le Chambon were quoted as saying the following: "things had to be done and we happened to be there to do them. It was the most natural thing in the world to help these people." We also talked some in class about how group identity can be used to be upstanders as well as perpetrators. To what extent do you think the people of Le Chambon's group identity as Protestants and descendents of persecuted people (the Huguenots)influenced their decision to help as many people as they did?
It was also mentioned in class/in the movie that Nazi soldiers often looked the other way, even knowing that Jews were being hidden, because they were surrounded by upstanders choosing to be benevolent. Do you think that it is easier to be influenced toward helping others or toward harming others? Does the ease with which one can be influenced to change their actions toward being an upstander, bystander or perpetrator depend on other factors, such as the size of the group, the conviction of group members, etc? If this ease does change, to what extent should repsonsibility for actions taken during a genocide be altered to fit these changes, both legally and morally speaking?

Khmer Rouge Justice

Last week two of the top officials of the Khmer Rouge, former minister Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal. This brings the number of top officials arrested to four, and many more are still at large. Here is a link to the Chronicle story: Khmer Rouge Couple Formally Detained

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975-79 and were responsible for roughly 1.7 million deaths from malnutrition, starvation, and murder. The government imposed very strict and unreasonably high grain taxes as part of their plan to increase Cambodia's productivity, though in reality the high quotas caused mass starvation and death among the rural Cambodian population. The Khmer Rouge is most well-known for its murdering and torturing of political dissidents in highly secret interrogation facilities such as S-21.

If you all will remember, the annihilation of certain political groups is not included under the legal definition of genocide, and it is for this reason that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are not accused of committing genocide, but of crimes against humanity, even though it targeted a specific group. Many people consider their actions a genocide, though legally it is not.

Some questions:
1) Why are political groups not included under the UN's definition of genocide? Should they be? Or is the law already complete as it is?
2) Why are leaders of the Khmer Rouge being convicted 30 years after the fact while leaders of the Young Turks were never convicted?
3) Should the interrogators (aka torturers and murderers) of the secret prisons be convicted of crimes as well? Even if they would have been killed had they disobeyed their orders?

Naomi Wolf: "The End of America"

Hello everyone,
I was watching the Colbert Report a little while ago and this author named Naomi Wolf was being interviewed. I couldn't help but notice how applicable her statements were to our study of the Weimar Republic. Wolf has written a book called “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," warning that American democracy is in danger in the same way democracy was endangered in the Weimar Republic. There's more information about her book here and there is also a video. It's almost an hour long, but it's very itneresting; there's also an anecdote at the beginning about her conversations with a Holocaust survivor who when discussing current American politics often says "this happened in Germany" in reference to the Weimar Republic. Wolf makes a list of ten actions that occur when dictatorships replace democratic governments, many of which are discussed in this article, where the use of torture and surveillance are both mentioned as part of the democracy-to-dictatorship process.

What are your thoughts on Wolf's opinion? Do you think America is in a similar state as the Weimar Republic before WWII in any respect? If so, why, and to what extent? If not, why not? Do you agree with the steps mentioned inthe second article as being indicative of a transfer away from democracy? If not, which steps do you think are not legitimate?
Do you have any other thoughts about Wolf's points that don't correspond to these questions?

Are Groups "Natural"?

During class I was interested in something Elias said—he said groups were a necessary thing for people, that we, in a sense, need them to function as people. I sort of did some philosophical research online, and I came up with an interesting question that philosophers like Spinoza considered. The question is: If two people, who had never seen a person before, suddenly met in the wilderness what would happen? Some people say that they would fight and try to kill one another in order to take each other's food, tools, whatever. Some people say they would sit down together and become good friends. And theres my favorite; some people say they would walk right past each other without even attempting to notice one another.

What do you think they'd do?

Week Summary: H Block

This week has been a informative and productive one. Our focus this week was on the Hitler Youth, and more widely, groups in general. We started the week off with a talk by Ralph, a survivor of the Nazi genocide who escaped Germany on the Kindertransport and lived the remainder of the war with a English-Jewish family who adopted him. We then watched a movie narrated by a man roughly the same age as Ralph who recounted his experiences in the Hitler Youth
He said that he had wanted to be a member of the Hitler Youth from a very young age, ever since he had seen them marching through his town; he had wanted to belong to something bigger than himself. He, and millions of others, had wanted to belong so badly that they had allowed themselves to become completely indoctrinated into the movement's ideology. The video raised some important questions: are youth more influencable than adults? Are the members of the Hitler Youth responsible for genocide? Can they be considered innocent?
We ended our week with a still on-going discussion about groups at lick. We talked about what factors go into forming a group, weather or not exclusion is always bad, and what might make someone want to join a group. We also discussed whether or not groups were a good or bad thing.
We even delved into the question of whether or not "human nature" exists. Is it natural for someone to want to belong to a group? Is that just a societal construction of human behavior It got interesting.